id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,component,severity,resolution,keywords,cc
12,PyYAML is slow,edemaine@…,xi,"Here are two simple wall-clock timings comparing PyYAML to PySyck on a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 1MB cache and 1GB RAM:

{{{
$ wc file1.yaml
 2036  8767 59154 file1
$ test.py file1.yaml
0:00:00.001419 to read the YAML via Syck
0:00:04.029627 to read the YAML via PyYAML
$ wc file2.yaml
  8949  35105 317342 file2
$ test.py file2.yaml
0:00:00.001564 to read the YAML via Syck
0:00:19.288912 to read the YAML via PyYAML
}}}

I do not expect PyYAML to be terribly competitive with Syck: the language barrier is big, and PyYAML is written with a higher level of abstraction.  But I was surprised to see a factor of 12,000 difference.  I wonder if a bit of profiling and tuning might reduce this gap to just a couple of orders of magnitude (100x) instead of four?  Personally, 19 seconds to read a 0.3 meg file is too slow for my application, so I'll have to switch back to Syck for now, unfortunately.  Just food for thought...",enhancement,closed,normal,pyyaml,normal,fixed,,